There was an interesting gathering last week in Washington. Some of the top names in the
Democratic Party celebrated naming the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency building after former
President Bill Clinton.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., gave the former president a cheery hug. Sen.
Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., proclaimed that the structure “will be forever known as the William
Jefferson Clinton Building.”

Carol Browner, who served as Clinton’s EPA administrator, said the ceremony honored “all the
environmental and natural-resource work done under the leadership” of Clinton and former Vice
President Al Gore. Clinton modestly said the building could have been named after Gore, while Gore
tweeted he was “proud to have been able to be part of a great team.”

Lost amid this love fest was just how this agency got there in the first place. Anybody
attending the ceremony might have concluded that (A) Clinton created the agency, (B) Gore invented
it, or (C) It simply sprouted up one day all by itself.

In reality, the EPA was the creation of President Richard M. Nixon. And although nobody at the
ceremony seemed to know it, when it comes to the environment — cover the children’s ears — Nixon’s
the One.

The Nixon administration not only conceived having one powerful agency to regulate pollution,
but Nixon’s first EPA administrator, William Ruckelshaus, pursued the reduction of automotive
emissions with such zeal that a General Motors executive called him the greatest friend of American
capitalism since Karl Marx.

Nixon probably signed more environmental laws than any other president, including the landmark
1970 Clean Air Act. He proposed the Safe Drinking Water Act, but Congress did not approve it until
after Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974.

I understand that naming a federal building after Nixon is probably not a great idea, although
some of my friends believe it would be appropriate to name a federal penitentiary after him. But
would it have killed anyone to acknowledge Nixon’s contributions to cleaning the environment?

“You would think we live in a partisan environment, wouldn’t you?” joked Frank O’Donnell,
president of the Clean Air Watch, a nonpartisan environmental organization in Washington. “It would
have been appropriate to acknowledge that the heritage of the EPA includes Republican leadership.
It’s the reality.”

Some environmentalists today do their best to dismiss Nixon’s environmental record, although
they run smack into a blizzard of inconvenient facts. They point out Nixon vetoed the 1972 Clean
Water Act. True, but they fail to say that Nixon originally proposed the measure and vetoed it when
Congress authorized spending four times as much money as he requested.

In another head-scratcher, some environmentalists claim Nixon only supported environmental laws
because it was politically popular at the time. Presumably that means Nixon is the only American
president who ever considered politics when it came to public policy.

Nobody made a big deal out of this show last week because Nixon’s name is toxic to Democrats and
the EPA is toxic to conservative Republicans. If today’s Republican Party had its way, the EPA
building would be named after Jack the Ripper.

But in their enthusiasm to highlight Clinton’s environmental record — which was a solid one —
Democrats missed an opportunity to emphasize how far to the right Republicans have shifted on the
environment.

“I think if they had acknowledged the bipartisan heritage of the EPA, it might have put the
Republican leadership in Congress in that much more of an accurate, but bad light,” O’Donnell
said.